During his visit to Belarus, Polish Foreign Minister Witold Waszczykowski met with representatives of civil cosiety and opposition and promised that Poland would continue supporting a number of Belarusian projects.
Politician Alyaksandr Milinkevich, a presidential candidate in 2006, has given a comment upon Waszczykowski’s speech to Belsat TV:
“We want [our] society to be more pro-European, not pro-Communist, so that it would never wish to be back in the USSR. That is why Witold Waszczykowski’s speech gave hope that there would be such a policy, I am sure of that. Secondly, when we met with him, we just said it was good that he was making this visit. It [Poland] is giving its hand, it is not sacrificing its principles, but offering cooperation.
We stressed the importance of such long-term projects as Belsat TV, Radio Racyja, Kalinouski scholarship program. It is crucial they be preserved and furser developed as they play a significant role in Belarus. The minister agreed and said: “We will leave them untouched, everything will be alright.”
It is of importance to us. I think that new people [in power] are not so quick to immediately develop a serious strategy, but new people always have a new view of things. No matter whether Civic Platform or Law and Justice were at the helm, they have been always unanimous about Belarus. I wish the Belarusian issue were never used for internal political struggle <…>
I do not believe that [these] Belarusian authorities will ever become democratic and pro-European. Many people in power still have Soviet creeds: they do not understand the West, they do not understand what human rights are. For many of them ‘human rights’ means having something good to eat and where to sleep. They must learn what human rights are. But if they are isolated, they will never learn! Of course, one should strive for free elections, for the debate in our society, for competition of ideas. But it takes time. And minister Waszczykowski said a very important thing: ‘The world was not built in a day!’”
In the course of his visit to Belarus, Witold Waszczykowski also laid flowers on the graves of the killed by Stalin’s executioners, visited a Polish visa centre in Minsk, met with his Belarusian counterpart Uladzimir Makey and held talks with president Alyaksandr Lukashenka.
Read also: Vox populi: What Belarusians think about Poland (ENG video)
